Slovak Policy, 1956-1960

The project looked at crucial political events in Slovakia between 1956 and 1960. 1956 saw the first attempt by Slovak intellectuals to reform the communist regime by increasing the degree of democracy and 1960 was the culmination of the strengthening of the political persecution that began after 1957. The period was characterised by the partial replacement of the informal-political instruments of control over society by formal measures, and the gradual weakening of the role of terror in people's daily life. Marusiak studied the gradual accommodation of the communist regime by the people, analysing the social and political history against the background of political development and of specific aspects such as the conflict of youth and intellectuals with the regime, the collectivisation of agriculture and the liquidation of the rest of the private sector in the economy, public opinion and the changes in the political system, the relations between state and churches, and ethnic problems in Czechoslovakia. He concludes that there was a continuity between the aims and methods used by the communist regime before and after 1953 (or 1956) and that the communist regime in this period remained fundamentally totalitarian.

The Bison: 1960

This digital object was funded in part through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The digitalization of this object was part of a collaborative effort with the Washington Research Library Consortium and George Washington University.

Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence (1960-1990)

There is a plethora of criminological explanations why criminal violence increased during the three decades between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. This paper argues that most available interpretations are lacking in three respects: they lack a historical perspective that anchors the three critical decades in a wider understanding of long-term trends; they take the nation-state as their unit of analysis and disregard important commonalities across the Western world; and they pay insufficient attention to different trends in broad categories of physical violence.This paper therefore takes a macro-level and long-term perspective on violent crime, focussing on European homicide during the past 160 years. It demonstrates that the period of increase was preceded by a long-term decline and convergence of homicide rates from the 1840s to the 1950s. Also, it shows that both the decline and the increase primarily resulted from temporal variation in the likelihood of physical aggression between men in public space. It argues that explanations of these common trends need to take into account broad long-term cultural change common to Western societies. In particular, the paper suggests that shifts in culturally transmitted and institutionally embedded ideals of the conduct of life may provide an explanation for long-term change in levels of interpersonal violence.